Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces Page 8

  As soon as the ceremony was over, Hubert and Singlaub climbed into the gazogene truck for the return journey to Egletons.

  There optimism remained low, despite the surrender of three German garrisons. The Luftwaffe was strafing everything that moved (Singlaub and Hubert had to hike the final few kilometers into town), and Luftwaffe bombs had turned much of Egletons into rubble, most notably the barn they had been using as a PC. Even so, Tony Dennau, their radioman, had stayed at his post in a corner of the building, sending messages to London even as the barn took direct hits. In the walls and ceiling all around him were numerous shrapnel scars. “Il est formidable, ” Wauthier beamed, indicating the radioman, when Singlaub and Hubert entered what was left of-the barn.

  Dominique was at Antoine’s command post down the street. And so, surprisingly, was Antoine, a tough little guy with a commanding, intelligent voice. When Singlaub arrived, Antoine and his staff were all atwitter with rumors that the troops of the Tulle garrison had not surrendered, but had broken free and were on the way to break the siege at Egletons, threatening the Free French forces’ rear.

  Though Singlaub carefully explained that he had been present when the entire Tulle garrison had surrendered, that information did not satisfy Antoine, who was in the process of sending teams from his already tightly strained companies out along the road to Tulle to establish ambush positions.

  Meanwhile, Coriolan had arrived with news that the German relief column was finally moving out of Clermont-Ferrand-2,000 heavily armed men in 150 trucks, defended by a pair of armored cars with automatic weapons.

  Tulle, it should be noted, was west of Egletons, while Clermont-Ferrand was cast. Diluting the strength of the forces in Egletons chasing phantom Germans could make the situation in Egletons perilous. Even more important, a terrific opportunity was presenting itself to ambush the relief column on the road between Ussel and Egletons. Antoinc’s troops were essential to add strength to that effort and to maintain pressure on the Egletons garrison. But Antoine would have none of that. It was an article of faith that Germans from Tulle were on the way to attack his rear. He would stop them.

  By nightfall, the town was quiet. Dominique and Wauthier had left to set up ambushes on the highway. The civilians were abandoning the town, and carrying with them the Maquis wounded. Remaining behind, for the moment, were Singlaub and Dennau, and the remnants of Hubert’s and Antoine’s troops. But as soon as all the civilians had been reported out of danger, Singlaub ordered the FTP and AS forces to fall back into the forest. Though he knew Dominique and Wauthier would damage the German relief column, there was no way they were strong enough to stop them with the forces at their disposal.

  Singlaub and Dennau grabbed their codebooks, their radio, a few emergency rations, their bundles of one-hundred-franc notes, and some spare Sten gun magazines and marched with the Maquis through the still-burning streets of Egletons. Soon they were passing through upland pastures and then forest trails. As they hiked through the darkness, they could just hear the distant rumble of land mines and the rattle of heavy machine guns—Dominique and Wauthier ruining the Germans’ evening.

  THE, next day, Singlaub linked up with Dominique and Wauthier in a ruined church. The ambushes, as expected, had not stopped the Germans, but had delayed them. And they had knocked out an armored car and six trucks, and killed at least twenty-five enemy soldiers.

  The relief column arrived in Egletons at dawn, loaded up the entire garrison onto the trucks, and rumbled off to Tulle, where they hoped to do the same thing. But of course they were a day late for that. Then they turned back toward Clermont-Ferrand.

  That afternoon, eight camouflaged Mosquitoes showed up (the war’s most beautiful warplanes), and elegantly swooped and dived, dropping bombs that flattened the school buildings. But the horses were out of the barn. The École Professionelle had been emptied of Germans.

  They were disappointingly late, but by then, the capture of the Correze garrisons, the siege of Egletons, the sabotage, the surrender of thousands of troops along with the seizure of their weapons, and the aggressive ambushes on the highways, had put the fire out of the Germans in Correze. The area was effectively liberated—not that there was a letup during the next weeks.

  Route 89 was kept open, in the expectation that the German First Army Group still garrisoned in southwest France would continue to use it as an avenue of escape. Dominique and Singlaub trained Antoine’s and Hubert’s troops in the use of the captured weapons, while sending out demolition teams to destroy the bridges on the side roads. Hubert’s ambushes along the highway continued.

  Hubert, meanwhile, came up with a scheme to use a fleet of trucks and scout cars he had captured to create a mobile attack force that would harass the retreating German columns to the north, between Correze and the Loire, and keep them too occupied to pose a danger to Patton on the other side of the river. The Free French command authorized this plan, even though Hubert had not yet received the arms shipment he had long ago requested (thousands of tons of munitions, officially destined for the Maquis, sat in warehouses in England, a typical wartime foulup; Maquis demands during the uprising were so many and so pressing that the distribution system cracked under the strain). Hubert had to strip some of his ambush teams of weapons in order to equip his mobile force. Dominique and Singlaub helped by getting hold of a fast 1939 front-wheel-drive Citroën and setting off on a series of lightning reconnaissance missions for him. The Germans staggered their convoys to protect them against Allied air attacks, but they staggered them at predictable intervals. The Jeds simply waited for an interval and then cruised blithely between them. The results were gratifying. Hubert’s force made life hell for the Germans for weeks.

  Antoine’s FTP, meanwhile, pulled out of the war to devote themselves to the political fight that would break out after the German surrender. The Communists took over the town of Tulle, with its arms factory, and got the factory running again (they had to force the technicians and engineers to work for them). The commissars above Antoine wanted weapons for the revolution they hoped to ignite after the war. That was more important than further participation in the liberation of France.

  On September 26, with Paris and most of France liberated, Team James returned to England for further assignments. For Jack Singlaub, that was to mean a mission to Southeast Asia—a story for another time.

  JACK Singlaub’s Jedburgh experience is certainly a compelling yarn, but it offers more than that. The story offers a model for the elements of unconventional warfare, as well as for the skills needed by special forces soldiers. It’s one of the primary texts in what might be called the Special Forces Bible.

  These are some of the more outstanding elements and skills it illustrates:The special soldier can expect to operate in arcas deep beyond the official lines of battle, where the zones controlled by one side or the other may be indistinct, or even meaningless. Likewise, he may have a hard time telling good guys from bad guys, and the official names or political pedigree of a leader, group, or faction may also not tell him much about who and what he is facing.

  He can expect to operate in a high-threat, high-stress environment, with little or no support from his parent organization.

  Hell need to be expert in all the basic soldier skills, not only as a military practitioner but as a teacher. He also needs to be familiar with a wide range of foreign weapons and systems, and he should be expert in various forms of hand-to-hand combat.

  He needs to be reasonably proficient in the language of the country in which he’s operating, and knowledgeable about the culture, political situation, and physical conditions of the people.

  Since he’ll be operating behind the lines, he must be able to live a cover story and handle other aspects of the tradecraft of the secret world.

  He must have the psychological strength to handle the stresses with which he’ll be faced: living on his own, the absence of support, the inevitable scrcwups of others, inevitably magnified by the absence of supp
ort.

  He must be endowed with considerable resourcefulness, flexibility, and ingenuity. More important, he must demonstrate a high level of psychological, political, and military acuity. He must be able to sell, persuade, cajole, browbeat, and convince people who dislike him, distrust him, and are doing their best to con him. His best weapon in this conflict will often be his ability to do his job so well that his adversary/friend can’t help but come to trust him.

  The stakes he faces are high. He and his team represent on their own the policies of their country. They will often have to make choices on how to implement these policies with little or no guidance from above. They have to be competent to make the right choices. At the same time, their choices directly affect not only the lives of the guerrillas or partisans with whom they are working, but—perhaps more important—the lives of both “innocent” and “involved” civilians.

  Each of these elements and skills comes more alive within a historical context—which brings us to Colonel Aaron Bank, who learned them at the same school as Singlaub, and later became one of the founders of U.S. Special Forces. Aaron Bank is on every Green Beret’s shortlist of Great Ones.

  AARON BANK

  Aaron Bank, another Jedburgh, parachuted into the south of France in 1944 and operated in Provence, where his experiences closely mirrored Jack Singlaub’s: attacks on strategic facilities and convoys, guidance and instruction of Maquis, conflicts with Communists. Following the liberation of France, Bank, who spoke passable German, and who was by then a major, was asked by his OSS superiors to create a special operations company of dissident German soldiers. Their mission—personally assigned by Bill Donovan himself—was to capture Hitler alive, in the event he and his henchmen attempted to barricade themselves in what the Nazis chose to call their National Redoubt in the mountains of Bavaria. The European war ended, the Redoubt proved to be a myth, and Bank’s mission was aborted. Later, Bank was sent by the OSS to lndochina, where, among other things, he spent a pleasant day or two traveling with Ho Chi Minh, as well as several fascinating months increasing his knowledge of peoples’ wars and guerrilla operations.

  The OSS was disbanded in September 1945, and Bank was brought back—somewhat reluctantly—into the main body of the Army. There he sorely missed the old Jedburgh thrill of always being on the edge of the action, and the Jedburgh freedom of operating on his own behind the lines (though he knew some traditionalists were uncomfortable with giving people like him so much leash—they called it lax and unmilitary). But he was himself a good soldier, and went where he was sent without public complaints.

  Far more important: He was certain the Army was losing something essential when it did not pick up the capabilities abandoned with the dissolution of the OSS Jedburgh teams and operational groups (the latter were teams of thirty men that could be split into two teams of fifteen—precursors of the twelve-man Special Forces A-Detachments). During World War II, operational groups were inserted behind the lines in Europe and Asia (primarily Burma), where they performed direct-action combat roles, such as sabotage, or linked up with guerrillas and partisans, as the Jcdburghs did.

  Bank believed that the postwar Army required similar units, but ones that were even better trained, equipped, prepared, and staffed. In his view, special operations forces designed to organize, guide, and equip indigenous resistance or guerrilla movements could turn out to be as essential as any of the conventional combat arms in the U.S. arsenal.

  IN 1947, the CIA was formed, with a mission to re-create the intelligence operations of the OSS. It was also given a covert, special operations role, to deal with resistance movements and guerrilla organizations, but it was never comfortable with it. Even after the creation of the CIA, Bank continued to feel a strong need for the Army to take on the entire task once performed by the Special Operations branch of the OSS.

  This conviction was not shared by the majority of the Army. Conventional soldiers tend to see unconventional warfare primarily as a sideshow, peripheral to the real action—that is, regular infantry, airborne, tanks, artillery—and more than a little outrageous. “To the orthodox, traditional soldier,” Bank writes in his memoir, From the OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces, “it was something slimy, underhanded, illegal, and ungentlemanly. It did not fit in the honor code of their profession of arms.”

  Over the years, U.S. soldiers have been especially vulnerable to this attitude. As noted before, our army is traditionally nervous about elites. It’s a citizens’ army—ordinary folks. Superior soldiers and superior units are welcome, but they aren’t expected to call much attention to themselves. Special forces, by their nature, call attention to themselves. A few years later, after the formation of U.S. Special Forces, assignment there was not thought to be a lucky career move.

  The U.S. Army is no more friendly to oddballs and reformers than it is to elites. It is bound by rules, nervous about innovation, slow to change. Revolutionaries need not apply. Yet, as Aaron Bank knew, the Army is not a monolith. It’s a very large house with hundreds of rooms. Reformers aren’t exactly encouraged, but smart, politically savvy, courageous men who are patient, do their homework, and are willing to risk their careers have a shot at making their changes stick—especially if an inspired few others share the dream.

  Meanwhile, during the years between the dissolution of the OSS and the outbreak of the war in Korea, Bank did his homework. Specifically, he read all he could find about unconventional warfare. What is it? How does it differ from “conventional” war? What does history say about it? Why do we have operations called “special”?

  UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

  Unconventional warfare is hard to pin down, but over the years, a working understanding has developed. It is far from complete, and is blind to many nuances, but it’s not a bad place to start:

  Unconventional warfare primarily involves operations different from the conventional fires and movement of massed troops, armor, artillery, and airpower. Normally, unconventional warfare is performed by small, highly trained units, takes place behind regular lines of battle, and involves such activities as reconnaissance, sabotage, raids, raids in force, assassination, and, above all, the training and support of friendly guerrilla forces. This comes under the overall title of direct action.

  One prime example of direct action was a blowtoreh-violent joint U.S./Canadian ranger unit, called the First Special Service Force (FSSF), that so distinguished itself in World War II that it has been designated an official ancestor of today’s Special Forces. The FSSF was formed to make lightning raids on targets such as the Germans’ heavy-water production facilities in Norway and the Romanian oil fields, but was used primarily to crack through mountain fortifications in Italy (where it took heavy losses).

  But unconventional—“special”—warfare also has other facets, as every Jedburgh knew: Screwing with your enemy’s head is one. Helping people in trouble—with medical aid, organizational advice and counsel, assistance in building bridges and roads, and getting clean water—is another. “Screwing with your enemy’s head” is called psychological operations, or PSYOPs (in Aaron Bank’s day: psychological warfare).

  “Helping people” usually comes under the rubric of civil affairs (CA), a tool that’s been in the special operations kit nearly as long as PSYOPs. There are many justifications for CA, including simple goodness, but its main military one is this: A population that is friendly to you and has experienced your kindness is not likely to feel kindly to—or give help and support to—your enemy.

  The debate has raged over which is the purest model for “special” units—larger units such as Rangers and commandoes, which tend more to direct action or smaller teams such as Jedburghs and A-Detachments, which specialize more in teaching and training indigenous forces.

  Here, as it turns out, “purest” is a blind alley, and the best answer is “all of the above.”

  HISTORICALLY, there is no clean division between conventional and unconventional wars. The historica
l roots of both go back equally far. At the time of Jesus, freedom fighters fought a long, drawn-out guerrilla war with the occupying Romans. A thousand years later, Vikings launched commando-type raids from seas and rivers. During Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, Spanish guerrillas forced the French army to regret their conquest (and Spaniards gave this form of warfare its name: guerrilla in Spanish means “little war”). Robin Hood and his men were guerrillas. T.E. Lawrence was a kind of semi-freelance special operations officer guiding indigenous Arabs in their struggle to break free of an oppressive occupying power.

  Traditionally, resistance, insurgent, or guerrilla movements spring up from people who are otherwise powerless to gain liberation from foreign occupation or to gain freedom from their own oppressive or tyrannical government—a prime instance of Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous insight, in On War, published in 1832, that war is simply another form of politics.

  Though von Clausewitz’s insight has never been lost on the more thoughtful of military men, military planners don’t normally give the political aspects of a problem serious consideration when they develop their strategy and tactics. They mostly see civilians as either encumbrances, props, or potential threats (“Get the damned civilians out of my way!”).

  Recent times have seen a change in these attitudes, a change that is reflected in the currently fashionable expression, “end state”—as in, “What end state do we want and how can we achieve it?” “End state” reflects both the military and political situation hoped for at the end of a conflict. Yet it still remains true that most military leaders do not normally consider how those under their command can affect a political situation that can in turn have a bearing on the outcome of a war.